ual elevation, and
possesses equal extent and profundity; in all that I have hitherto
said, I only wished to guard against admitting that the former
preponderated. He is highly inventive in comic situations and motives:
it will be hardly possible to show whence he has taken any of them,
whereas, in the serious part of his dramas, he has generally laid hold
of some well-known story. His comic characterization is equally true,
various, and profound, with his serious. So little is he disposed to
caricature, that rather, it may be said, many of his traits are almost
too nice and delicate for the stage, that they can be made available
only by a great actor and fully understood only by an acute audience.
Not only has he delineated many kinds of folly, but even of sheer
stupidity has he contrived to give a most diverting and entertaining
picture. There is also in his pieces a peculiar species of the
farcical, which apparently seems to be introduced more arbitrarily,
but which, however, is founded on imitation of some actual custom.
This is the introduction of the merrymaker, the fool with his cap and
bells and motley dress, called more commonly in England "clown," who
appears in several comedies, though not in all, but, of the tragedies,
in _Lear_ alone, and who generally merely exercises his wit in
conversation with the principal persons, though he is also sometimes
incorporated into the action. In those times it was not only usual for
princes to have their court fools, but many distinguished families,
among their other retainers, kept such an exhilarating house-mate as a
good antidote against the insipidity and wearisomeness of ordinary
life, and as a welcome interruption of established formalities. Great
statesmen, and even ecclesiastics, did not consider it beneath their
dignity to recruit and solace themselves after important business with
the conversation of their fools; the celebrated Sir Thomas More had
his fool painted along with himself by Holbein. Shakespeare appears to
have lived immediately before the time when the custom began to be
abolished; in the English comic authors who succeeded him the clown is
no longer to be found. The dismissal of the fool has been extolled as
a proof of refinement; and our honest forefathers have been pitied for
taking delight in such a coarse and farcical amusement. For my part, I
am rather disposed to believe that the practice was dropped from the
difficulty in finding fools able to